Readers' Choice Awards 2011: Cameras and Camcorders

Okay, we won’t beat around the bush. Canon is the PCMag Readers’ Choice winner in both the camera and camcorder categories. In cameras, it shares the award with Nikon; in camcorders, Sony also earns Readers’ Choice. Before you dive into our analysis about which camera and camcorder companies are providing the best products and services, consider a couple fundamental questions:

1) These days, why would you buy a camcorder when so many digital cameras take perfectly good videos?

2) Why would you buy a digital camera when the photos and videos taken with mobile phones keep getting better and better and those phones make it so much easier to share with others?

As with all PCMag.com Readers’ Choice surveys—this is our sixth installment for 2011—our new camera and camcorder questionnaire helps us figure out which companies are providing the best products and service. We also added some new questions to get a better understanding of how you are actually capturing your memories.

Nearly every respondent (99 percent) still uses a digital camera to take pictures, but four out of five people are also using their mobile phone to do so. When it comes to video, almost as many people use their digital camera (56 percent) as camcorder (58 percent) and many also use their phone (43 percent).

We also asked what percentage of photos and videos were taken with each type of device, and we found that cameras and camcorders are still the most popular in their respective categories. That said, a significant portion of photos and videos are being captured with other devices.

Taking pictures with a mobile phone continues to increase in popularity, and it appears to be changing the nature of the camera market. Survey respondents are buying fewer compact and ultracompact cameras, perhaps because these cameras tend to be purchased for their convenience more so than for their features, and nothing beats the convenience of a mobile phone. Instead, people who chose to purchase a camera in the last year tended towards higher-end devices that offer features or images quality with which the phones can’t compete. The higher-end categories include enthusiast cameras, superzooms, digital SLRs (D-SLRs), and compact interchangeable lens cameras.

With camcorders, the shift is in the opposite direction. Fewer survey respondents are purchasing expensive, high-end camcorders, likely because so many of today’s digital cameras are capable of capturing very pleasing HD video. Instead, the trend is towards small cameras that are much more focused on ease of sharing than on features and image quality, such as Cisco’s Flip line (may it rest in peace), Kodak’s Play camcorders, and Sony’s Bloggies. Nearly 40 percent of the camcorders that you purchased within the last year cost $149 or less. And whereas the move towards higher-end digital cameras has actually pushed the average purchase price up slightly, the average amount you’re spending on camcorders is plummeting, down about $200 over the past 4 years.

Cameras and camcorders won’t disappear tomorrow as mainstream consumer devices. Still, the rapid improvement and adoption of mobile phone cameras is going to pressure camera and camcorder manufacturers to innovate and build more useful and appealing devices.

CATEGORY: CAMERAS

For years, two companies have dominated the camera market, Canon and Nikon. The two giants need to figure out how to succeed as their market is encroached upon by mobile phones. They also have to deal with several significant competitors, including old-time rivals Olympus and Pentax, as well electronics companies, such as Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, and Casio; all of them are trying to grab their own piece of the pie. Many of these competitors are pushing the envelope on innovation, but when it comes to satisfying customers, Canon and Nikon remain at the top and receive our 2011 PCMag.com Readers’ Choice Award for cameras.

Both Canon and Nikon offer diverse product lines, ranging from budget cameras to sophisticated digital single-lens reflex (D-SLRs) models for consumers and professionals. Canon is the most consistently excellent company in the survey. Its cameras received the highest overall rating in the ultracompact, compact, budget, and waterproof categories, and it ties with Nikon in the system camera category, which includes D-SLRs and the emerging breed of mirrorless compact interchangeable lens cameras (CILCs).

In the two categories that Canon did not have the highest overall ratings, enthusiast and superzoom cameras, it came in second. In addition, the company had the highest likelihood of recommending rating in every category. We’re also impressed by Canon’s tech support satisfaction, which improved from a respectable 7.5 out of 10 in 2010 to an excellent 8.2.

As in past years, Nikon receives very high marks for its D-SLRs, which tied with Canon in overall rating (9.0), reliability (9.3), and likelihood to recommend (9.4). Nikon’s superzoom, enthusiast, and compact cameras are also among the most highly regarded. Satisfaction with tech support and repairs scores were decent at 7.3 and 6.5, respectively, but purchasers of Nikon point-and-shoot cameras should bear in mind that these numbers are inflated by the very good tech support (8.1) and repair service (7.5) that the company provides its D-SLR customers.

Nikon just announced its entry into the CILC category with its Nikon 1 line. CILC cameras were pioneered by Panasonic and Olympus. They feature significantly larger sensors than point-and-shoot cameras but eschew the optical viewfinders found on D-SLRs, permitting for much more compact designs. By this time next year, we should know if support and satisfaction for the soon-to-be-released Nikon 1 cameras will match the standard set by the company’s D-SLRs.

While CILC cameras are getting a lot of attention, it’s still a nascent market, and only one CILC line of cameras, Sony’s NEX-series, received enough responses to be included in our survey results. The results were very impressive for a new entrant, coming in just behind Canon’s and Nikon’s D-SLRs in overall rating and likelihood to recommend. The Sony CILCs reliability score is the highest among the high end (9.4) and no respondents reported that their cameras needing repairs in the last 12 months.

It’s also been a very good year for Sony in the superzoom category—point-and-shoot cameras with a 10X or greater zoom lens. The company’s superzooms’ overall rating of 8.6 was better than every other brand, including perennial survey favorite Panasonic. Sony also achieved good scores in several other categories and receives an Honorable Mention.

While Panasonic may have lost its top spot in superzooms, it wasn’t far behind with an overall rating of 8.5. The company’s cameras in this category had the highest reliability rating in the category (9.1) and the fewest superzooms needing repairs (1 percent). Panasonic had the lowest repair rate across all categories (2 percent) as well. It received the highest overall rating from our readers in the enthusiast category and was consistently in the top tier in other categories. For these reasons, Panasonic also gets an Honorable Mention.

CATEGORY: CAMERAS

Canon, Inc. No other camera manufacturer is as consistently excellent as Canon, receiving top scores in several categories. Not only are readers impressed with the company’s products, they’re also very pleased with Canon’s tech support, which improved substantially upon the good service that it had provided customers in prior years.

Nikon Corporation Synonymous with SLR photography since the early days of film, Nikon once again receives top marks for its digital SLRs. The company stands behind these cameras with superior service and support.

Panasonic Corporation Aside from Canon, no company is as consistently good across as many camera categories as Panasonic.

Sony Corporation Sony superzooms made it to the top of the heap in this popular category this year, and the company’s new compact interchangeable lens cameras are giving digital DSLRs a run for their money.

CATEGORY: CAMCORDERS

This is the first year that we’ve included camcorders in our reader survey. As we noted at the beginning of this article, the market is rapidly changing. Inexpensive camcorders that make sharing easy are gaining in popularity, and more feature-rich camcorders are facing stiff competition from digital cameras. Our two Readers’ Choice-winning companies, Canon and Sony, make a broad range of camcorders from basic, low-cost models to very high-end prosumer and professional HD units.

Canon and Sony had identical overall ratings of 8.0. This is a fairly low score for top satisfaction. In comparison, the top-rated digital cameras in our survey had overall ratings of 8.6. (Compare the scores with newer camcorders, where Canon and Sony score much higher with newer products, which is typical in our survey results.) Still, there’s no one nipping at these companies’ coattails. The next best overall performers in the survey, Cisco/Flip, Kodak, and Panasonic, only had overall ratings of 7.5.

Kodak receives an Honorable Mention for having the highest rated camcorders in the budget market, a market created by the surprising popularity of Pure Digital’s Flip Video camcorders. In 2009, Cisco purchased Pure Digital in an effort to expand the Cisco’s presence in the home. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out the way the company had hoped, and in April of this year, it announced that it was shutting down the Flip division. The Flip Video camcorders are still widely available and actually received much higher ratings than Kodak across the board among budget camcorders purchased within the last 12 months.

CATEGORY: CAMCORDERS

Canon, Inc. Canon has been a consistent winner of PCMag’s Readers’ Choice in the printer and camera categories for years, and now it can add a camcorder award to its shelf.

Sony Corporation Sony earned similar high marks to Canon for overall rating, reliability, and likelihood of recommending. We would like to see improvement in the company’s tech support, however.

Eastman Kodak Company Kodak had the highest overall rating and likelihood of recommending in the budget camcorder category, though we are concerned that Kodak camcorders purchased recently aren’t as well regarded as the company’s older devices.

Methodology

We e-mailed survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, including subscribers to our Digital Edition, newsletters, and more. The survey was hosted by hosted by Equation Research, which also performed our data collection. Respondents were asked only to rate products and services that they actually use. The respondents were asked several questions about their overall satisfaction with their cameras and camcorders and about the products' reliability, as well as their experiences with technical support and repairs within the past 12 months. Each person who completed the survey was entered into a drawing to win a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet. The survey was in the field from September 6, 2011 through September 14, 2011.

Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the vendors compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another, the category averages are based on the average of each vendor's rating, not the average of every respondent's rating. In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on reader answers to the question, "Overall, how would you rate this camera?"

Scores not represented as a percentage are on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is best.

A blank in a table indicates that we do not have enough responses to give the company a score in that column.

The Readers' Choice Awards and Honorable Mentions are based on subjective determination by PCMag.com's editors, taking into account all of the ratings for each vendor.

Net Promoter Score

"How likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" No other question can better define the loyalty of a company's customers than this one, according to Fred Reichheld's best seller, "The Ultimate Question." Reichheld, a fellow with the consulting firm Bain & Company, used the answer to this question to help understand which customers were enthusiastic about a company, which were satisfied but unenthusiastic, and which customers were unhappy.

Companies with the most loyal customers (Promoters) and fewest dissatisfied customers (Detractors) are creating "good profits." These are generally the most profitable in their category, according to Reichheld. These are also the companies—such as Canon, Nikon and Sony—from whom we feel our readers will want to purchase cameras and camcorders.

For years, PCMag has asked readers how likely they would be to recommend a company and we've used this measure as an important factor in determining which companies were our Readers' Choice winners in their respective categories. We now present the answer to that question as both an average and a Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures brand loyalty.

Calculating NPS is very straightforward. We ask the recommendation question on a 0 to 10 scale where 10 is best. We break the answers down into three groups according to the methodology's definitions:

• Passives (score 7 or 8): satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings

• Detractors (score 0 to 6): unhappy customers who can damage the brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth

We then subtract the percent of detractors from the percent of promoters: Promoters percent - Detractors percent = NPS.

So, for instance, 79 percent of Canon camera respondents are Promoters and 4 percent are Detractors, so the company has a 74 percent NPS. At the other end of the scale, Aiptek camcorders have fewer Promoters than Detractors (28 percent versus 42 percent) for a negative 14 percent NPS. The company has more customers speaking ill of the brand than promoting it.